JAY-Z Read online

  Following JAY-Z will demand, too, the kind of aching masculine vulnerability that Jay showed in confessing his sins publicly. The world had already seen a glimpse of the box into which his painfully limiting masculinity had painted him when the recording of the elevator scene leaked in May 2014, nearly two years before Lemonade. There he is, in stark black and white, dressed to the nines, along with Beyoncé and her sister Solange, and their bodyguard Julius de Boer. As they get on the elevator, Solange first, she immediately begins to swing and kick at her brother-in-law, and Jay fends off her fists and feet, which are coming in a flurry, aimed at anywhere on his body. But he is too tall and he grabs her foot once and never strikes back, and she only connects three times, since de Boer is mostly holding her back. Beyoncé bears silent witness.

  The scene might have spelled enormous trouble. There could have been days of public relations interventions and crisis management consultations. Instead, the trio released a single brief statement saying that the family had worked through their issues and that “Jay and Solange each assume their share of responsibility for what has occurred,” and that each “acknowledge their role in this private matter that has played out in the public.” What might have been an irrevocable embarrassment and stain on their reputations instead sparked growth, change, and some of the most affecting art and revealing music the couple has ever produced.

  While black culture isn’t the only culture to absorb hardship and translate it into gain, the particular elements here suggest black traits of survival, black traditions of overcoming impossible odds—of taking lemons and making lemonade. That phrase was sampled from a video recording of a speech made by JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White at her ninetieth birthday party in Clayton, Delaware, in April 2015. In a nice moral symmetry, JAY-Z’s maternal line gave his wife the language to articulate both the bitterness of her predicament and the possibility of turning it sweet and satisfying. Jay and Bey’s well-known habit of not speaking—not about the beginning of their relationship, not much about their wedding, not a great deal about their private affairs—served them well in cloaking this potential fiasco with the shroud of silence. But the silence clearly wasn’t neutral, nor indifferent to the domestic trouble to which it pointed. Their lives and art are proof enough.

  They turned a historic disadvantage of blackness, invisibility, in their favor, and made it a tool of their spiritual rebirth and moral awakening. As arguably the most visible couple on the globe—the Obamas are active, yet out of office, but Queen Bey and the King of New York are royalty forever—invisibility wasn’t an obstacle but a lifesaver. It was quite a feat: the most visible black folk on earth retreated, in public view, while carrying on their lives, into a space they defined for themselves, on their terms, an existential black hole from which nothing, no information, no hints, no suggestions, no gossip, could escape. This method of playing everything close to the vest, of holding all at Bey, was not simply how they chose to release their recent music. It was also how they chose to release themselves from the images, views, beliefs, opinions, doubts, and commentary of the culture and outsiders, and their own fears and mistakes. This space allowed them to discover anew who they are in the infinite interiority of psychological solitude.

  In pragmatic terms the trio won. Solange, a world-class pop artist and fashionista, came across as a woman who was ride-or-die for her beloved sister—and went on to release A Seat at the Table in 2016, a contemporary R&B and pop soul classic. Beyoncé, when she exited the elevator, looked, well, flawless. Jay later confessed on “Kill Jay Z” that he was dead wrong, “You egged Solange on / Knowin’ all along, all you had to say you was wrong.” In a September 7, 2017, Rap Radar podcast interview, Jay said of himself and Solange, “We had one disagreement ever. Before and after, we’ve been cool.” He said that “[s]he’s like my sister. I will protect her. That’s my sister, not my sister-in-law. My sister. Period.” Beyoncé talked about it through song without speaking about it otherwise. Lemonade, like the elevator video, is a recording of tumultuous reckoning. Beyoncé sang later on the “Flawless Remix”: “But no, we escalating, up in this bitch, like elevators / Of course sometimes shit go down / When it’s a billion dollars on an elevator.”

  Jay’s mature and introspective masculinity on 4:44 opened the way for the Carters to make a record together. The pain of Lemonade and 4:44 will forever mark the records as locked in an epic lovers’ quarrel. But the synthesis, Everything Is Love, which arrived on June 16, 2018, creates for listeners a third space for black lovers. It joins the first two entries in this mythic trilogy but stands alone in ways that the first two records cannot. It is, in so many ways, a testament to the endurance of black love and black relationships. Everything is love. On “Black Effect,” Jay and Bey sing and rap in tandem about their love of blackness itself. It is still an astonishing and tragically rare feat for black artists to publicly love blackness in the face of the withering efforts to demean and diminish it.

  Sometimes the daggers come from within. Jay has had to deal with the black self-hatred that would see him as ugly because of his features, especially his lips, perfectly formed African versions of labium superius oris and labium inferius oris that spit an entire universe of black beauty into existence. That rhetoric flows from an ocean of ideas inside a brain now shielded by a shock of glorious locs atop his head.

  For these two artists to hold forth on this subject matter in this way helps to extend the very thing about which they sing and rap. Black love’s black effect is given a black boost by two of the biggest and blackest stars on earth. No space is therefore foreign to them. No black body unlovable or undesirable. Jay and Bey’s love is a contagious black love that loves all bodies and all black places.

  That love, of course, includes same-sex and same-gender loving folk. When Jay shared with the world that his mother Gloria Carter is lesbian, he not only swam against deep tides of homophobia, but he rescued many souls drowning in self-hate or being pulled under by hatred and fear from other black folk. Several years ago, before the revelation of the queer identity of Gloria Carter, Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal, in his book Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, penned a chapter on JAY-Z, “My Passport Says Shawn,” where he probed the “value of having the theoretical worlds of black feminist and queer theory … travel through the body of a highly visible and influential masculine icon of hip-hop.” Neal proved prophetic since it is on JAY-Z’s 4:44 album, in his words, in this particularly confessional and revealing body of work, that he helped his mother come out to the world.

  Jay’s and Beyoncé’s love is at once personal and political, and, as they claim, “I’m good on any MLK Boulevard (I’m good),” which means they’re good in any community where black people live. The naming and renaming of urban streets after black political and civil rights heroes has become the political pastime of a peculiarly American brand of incrementalism. Posthumous black heroes are often more palatable to the powers that be than living, thriving warriors who would push back at the limitations placed on black life. In death, Emmett Till’s name claims a street in Chicago even though in life his humanity was utterly invisible to the white men who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered him. And so goes the eponymous reclaiming of countless urban boulevards in the name of Martin Luther King. I have never equivocated in my full-throated estimation of Dr. King as the greatest American who ever lived. He is that and more; and the fact that so many streets, avenues, and boulevards across urban America bear King’s name is a stirring tribute to his transcendent status. But those tributes cannot obscure the irony of poverty that plagues many of the neighborhoods through which MLK Boulevards run. I am certainly not the first person to acknowledge this, but in most hoods, MLK Boulevards aren’t the safest places to be. This fact makes Jay’s and Bey’s allusion to being “good” on any MLK Blvd the equivalent of saying that they are good in any hood. One cannot love black people without being able to love where they are from and commune with them where they are.
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  But Jay has also made sure to speak about other avenues to black survival that occurred long before streets got named after fallen icons. The specter of slavery haunts the African American mind and shadows a society that too often refuses to acknowledge its complicity in this nation’s most grievous offense. On “Oceans,” which, like “Made in America,” features a hook by R&B singer Frank Ocean, Jay takes stock of the nearly incomprehensible loss of black life in the transatlantic slave trade. That unspeakable horror marked bodies as chattel and shipped them to North American ports of call. Slavers were able to do evil deeds in the name of the marketplace and religion. Thus, it became clear that the slavers’ theology permitted them to reconcile the beef between God and mammon in promoting a racist gospel. Tragically, their approach echoes today in white evangelical heretics who try to trump Obama because they deem him Beelzebub while heralding Trump as a political savior.

  Right off the bat, Jay situates the blood of the black enslaved who died in the oceans with the ravages of another form of disaster capitalism when he observes, “The oil spill that BP ain’t clean up.” Jay proceeds to connect European imperial ventures to American discovery, challenging the ballyhooed patron saint Christopher Columbus revered in our collective imaginations and enshrined in our history books. He offers, instead, the prospect of reverence for the dead but not forgotten Brooklyn MC Biggie Smalls. “I’m anti-Santa Maria / Only Christopher we acknowledge is Wallace.” He follows it with a figurative association that seals his insurrectionist impulse. “I don’t even like Washingtons in my pocket,” he insists.

  What might he mean here? Not liking such small denomination bills; not liking the history of a president who enslaved black folk; not wanting a white face in his pocket. Hence his next line, “Black card go hard when I’m shopping,” symbolizes a level of elite status not easily attained even by those who would slight Jay today. Once again it suggests wealth as a means to oppose racism. It suggests, too, the superiority of a product created by a black man, Kenneth Chenault, who was at the helm of American Express when the black card was introduced. (It is not hard to imagine the symbolic value to black folk, and the broader culture, of the most exclusive charge card on the market being a black one.) Perhaps Jay simply didn’t want the filth and lucre associated at times with the U.S. Capitol to soil his pockets. Jay finishes the verse contrasting slave ships with his yacht, but this time his boat “docked in front of Hermès picking cotton,” as his fate as the offspring of enslaved ancestors permits their bejeweled progeny (he refers to his Jesus piece, jewelry showing the face of the Savior and made famous in hip hop circles) to practice a bit of compensatory economic justice.

  After all, when he says that he will “lay [put] on my Jesus,” he not only adorns his neck with jewelry, but he conjures images of captured Africans forced to lie atop each other in slave ships, especially Jesus of Lubeck, the first slave ship to darken the West. Jay brags that, emboldened by his ancestral energy, “I crash through glass ceilings, I break through closed doors,” in proxy of the women and men in the past whose flesh was enslaved, and black folk now whose lives are hampered by obstacles. All of this makes sense as Ocean sings, “Because this water drown my family, this water mixed my blood / This water tells my story, this water knows it all.” Those who lost their lives and whose blood spilled in the waters tell a story of a people stolen, bound, and shipped, and later castrated, raped, and murdered, whether lynched from trees or thrown into the Mississippi River. This is what it has meant to voyage inside the hull of the American experiment.

  Jay has consistently taken on American ideals, American myths, and American illusions, whether sitting in on an instant classic by rapper Meek Mill, “What’s Free,” to up the ante and point out American hypocrisy (“In the land of the free, where the blacks enslaved / Three-fifths of a man, I believe’s the phrase”), or letting loose on “A Ballad for the Fallen Soldier,” one of JAY-Z’s most sophisticated critiques of American patriotism and American law enforcement. The song’s lyrics cling to an extended analogy between “street” soldiers and conventional soldiers in the throes of American empire. Jay compares the state of the nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ongoing siege of black America, using a slant rhyme to offer his slant on things:

  Bin Laden been happening in Manhattan

  Crack was anthrax back then, back when

  Police was Al ’Qaeda to black men.

  JAY-Z uses an experience Americans are familiar with as a bridge to an experience that is largely foreign to them—the vulnerability and disposability of black life in what feels like a police state.

  The song is a phenomenology of existential dread, a glimpse into the torturous state of affairs for black folk—a completely arbitrary form of relentless assault that leaves them exposed and defenseless. Every time a black body is senselessly beaten by a baton, bloodied by a fist, pummeled while prostrate with hands secured behind the back, hunted and harmed, or mercilessly shot on purpose with no good reason, black life is in terror. And then to have it all happen time and again until it is ingrained in black minds to leave our blackness behind. That, by the way, is impossible, though we attempt to do so by swallowing ourselves inside of our fear. But that never works either, because we are, invariably, shot in cold blood like wild animals, indeed far worse than wild animals. This is the sense of terror that JAY-Z seeks to express. This is the coerced helplessness in the face of a gory Neapolitan dessert consumed by the streets: vanilla cops, chocolate bodies, strawberry blood spilled from black limbs.

  If “Bin Laden been happening,” then this joyless ballad is for those who have fallen prey to destruction in their illegal activities in the underground economy and for those who have fallen victim to police brutality whether they are guilty or not. Herein lies the terror: in the end it makes little difference in how we are seen or treated. And for those who deem it hyperbole to compare the assault on black life to terrorist attacks, the failure to see the parallel only increases the distance between black and white, only increases the suffering.

  On so many other songs, Jay tells truths: about police brutality, about stalled criminal justice, about the value of generational wealth, about white supremacy, about the need for black love. These truths might be lost to the audiences that buy his records or download his music, if he didn’t entice, seduce, brag, exhort, and party. Conscious rap’s appeal, the allure of “wokeness,” is undeniable, especially in a culture combating recrudescent bigotry and the vicious toll of white supremacy. But Jay knows that if the music doesn’t move your behind it has little chance to stimulate your brain. Many, as we have seen, have taken that to mean he isn’t smart or sophisticated, when he is both. They’ve used his approach to dismiss his political urgency and racial relevance, when, clearly, he’s got both in spades.

  On “Minority Report,” JAY-Z dramatically effects sotto voce in a somber tone. “My peoples was poor before the Hurricane came,” he hauntingly chants about Katrina’s fury. The solidarity of his opening line stings because human solidarity was painfully absent in the aftermath of the storm. The survivors were seen as “refugees” in their own nation. The racial division was clear: white folk were “searching” for scarce resources while black folk were “looting.” Some black folk paid the ultimate price for this racist distinction, even after surviving one of the greatest disasters the nation had ever experienced. JAY-Z’s “Minority Report” brought home to me how the black poor had long ago been abandoned by our society and cruelly assaulted by black elites like Bill Cosby. The comedian-cum-social-critic tagged the black poor as fatally promiscuous, nearly allergic to education and good speech; he said they saddled their kids with weird names and were eager to blame the white man for their ills.

  The concept of a “minority report” is straightforward enough. It is an opinion that officially dissents from the majority in a group. In this instance it has racial significance. Jay’s view of Katrina dissents from that of the white majority and t
he government. The idea of a minority report resonates strongly in black culture, where views on race in particular often run counter to the mainstream. One might reasonably argue that some of hip hop’s best lyrics should be included alongside the many such reports from black culture over the centuries. These reports might include, for example, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman,” Ida B. Wells’s Red Record, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. They are all minority reports, all dissenting from what passes as racial common sense.

  To be sure, the word “minority” clashes with the idea of a global network of people of color. “Minority” is often a euphemism for black folk that at once names and yet eviscerates black experience. The term, useful as it may be in some instances, centers white history as a norm and surrenders linguistic territory to white dominance, perhaps even white supremacy. Jay’s “Minority Report” pushes back against all of this. While others let the black poor float in the deadly waters, and still others drowned them in stigma, shame, and a river of lies, Jay lays claim to New Orleans residents as his people, a life-affirming assertion in the midst of death. But he does more than talk; he makes a monetary contribution to their welfare. Still, he is introspective, yielding a powerful gesture of self-criticism as he takes measure of his failure to respond as courageously and as responsibly as he might have.

  Sure I ponied up a mil’ but I didn’t give my time

  So in reality I didn’t give a dime

  Or a damn, I just put my monies in the hands

  Of the same people that left my people stranded

  Nothin’ but a bandit, left them folks abandoned.